The collaboration between Gareth Davis and Robin Rimbaud (Scanner) brings together two restless explorers of sound who can never quite decide whether they’re making music, conducting an experiment, or just seeing what happens when acoustic and electronic worlds collide.
Scanner, the alter ego of Robin Rimbaud, has spent decades turning technology, field recordings, and stray bits of everyday noise into hypnotic, emotionally charged soundscapes — sometimes surprising even himself.
When they perform together, the lines between instrument and electronics blur. Davis’s breath and tone melt into Scanner’s live processing; melodies float, noises pulse, and silence stretches like elastic. Their music is less about genre and more about atmosphere — part concert, part installation, part conversation over espresso or lack thereof.
Over the years, they’ve performed in festivals, museums, and unconventional spaces across Europe, often collaborating with filmmakers, visual artists, and contemporary composers. Each project starts with curiosity, a lot of listening, and a willingness to let the work evolve on its own terms — occasionally interrupted by good food or spontaneous ideas that somehow become music.
Whether reimagining existing pieces or creating immersive new works from scratch, Davis and Scanner invite audiences into a sound world where human and machine meet, collide, and occasionally joke with one another. It’s a place that feels intimate, inventive, and just unpredictable enough to keep everyone on their toes.
When the ghost in the machine meets the breath in the reed, expect sparks. Electronic sound artist Robin Rimbaud – Scanner joins forces with acclaimed British bass clarinetist Gareth Davis to create an album where circuitry hums, wood vibrates, and the air between notes crackles with possibility.
This is no polite meeting of minds — it’s an elegant collision. Scanner’s intricate electronic textures weave around Davis’s deep, resonant tones, blurring the boundary between acoustic breath and digital pulse. The result is a sound world that’s at once intimate and expansive, familiar yet thrillingly unpredictable.
Think late-night conversations in abandoned buildings. Think fog rolling over neon. Think sound that slips through your fingers even as it takes hold of you.
The songlines in question , memories and distorted images of travels across various continents, form an imagined biography of places that might or might not have been but somehow seem to exist . Landscapes of blurred statements , lost words and echoes of meandering structures.
“If Miles Davis had been raised on shortwave radio static and midnight phone calls, it might have sounded like this.”
This is a text section that sits next to a YouTube player. Use it for commentary, background info,
or context for the video on the right.
Releases
